Hyperloop High-Speed Transit Unveiled

Original Published: 8/18/2013 Imagine if you could commute from New York to Los Angeles in less than an hour.
A technology mogul is looking at ways to reinvent mass transportation.
Maggie Lake takes a look at what that new method might look like.
It sounds like something out of the cartoon show "The Jetsons."
A space-age method of transport some say could get you from New York to L.A. in less than an hour.
Superstar entrepreneur Elon Musk of Tesla and Space X Fame hinted at the project in an interview with tech site Pando Daily.
"I have a name for it, which is called the Hyperloop," he says.
"The Hyperloop?" asked CNN's Maggie Lake.
"The Hyperloop. Yeah," says Musk.
But naming it is the easy part.
"But I don't know what that is?"
Trying to explain it is something else entirely, as the hosts of All Things D found out.
"It's this cross between a Concorde, a rail gun and an air hockey table," says Musk.
Still confused?
I met up with science writer Brian Merchant inside the old school, New York City subway system to get the real Hyperloop scoop.
"What do you think it might be like?' asked Lake. "It's suppose to be nothing like the infrastructure we're used to, right?"
"Right," says Merchant. "So he says it's going to be the fifth mode of transportation, like nothing we've seen before."
"Hopefully nothing like this, so what would it look like?" asks Lake.
"So the smart moneys says it'll look something like a pneumatic tube, sort of like an enclosed tube, and we just blast air through that kind of like, you know those old school mail systems when you stuff the package up and it gets sucked up," says Merchant. "We're going to be launched from this rail gun. Boom! You're off -- 600 miles per hour!"
"So I'm imagining my face, says Lake. "Is this going to be something I want to ride on?"
"I think so, because in a controlled environment, speed itself doesn't actually impact human health," says Merchant.
The basic idea for this type of transport has been around for decades, and while we don't when or if the Hyperloop will even be built, it has captured the imagination of futurists.
Videos like this one on YouTube are attempting to show what a Hyperloop system would look like. But in the real world, there will be challenges.
"We're going to have some serious not in my backyard problems," says Merchant.
But all of us stuck in traffic jams, air delays and stinky subways can dream, can't we?
"I love it, it is the voice that is needed to move us forwadr. Somebody that says these old ways aren't working," says Merchant. "Old transit is kinda boring, it's inefficient. Why don't we leapfrog all that with something radical?"
We'll see if Elon Musk can take radical and turn it into reality.

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